Play On! An Exclusive Preview of Once on Broadway

Once keeps going. Begun as a film in 2006, the made-on-a-shoestring Dublin-based love story between an Irish busker and a Czech-born classical pianist was—after long ticket lines and an Oscar for Best Original Song (“Falling Slowly”)—reborn as a concert tour by the film’s costars (and real-life couple), Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who then broke up, as noted in the subsequent documentary The Swell Season. Then, before the Off-Broadway musical version of Once officially even opened in December, it was announced that the show would move uptown, to the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Now director John Tiffany (Black Watch) has crafted a Broadway musical that is the sparse opposite of the likes of Spider-Man: Opening this month, Once is charmingly homemade, its centerpiece the low-tech magical wizardry of a troupe of humans playing guitars and fiddles, a rare and entrancing special effect in our heavily gadgeted times.

The music’s clearly the thing, though it almost kept some cast members away. Steve Kazee (playing the part that Hansard did in the film) was such a huge fan of both the film and its sound track—yes, that was Kazee up in front when the Swell Season’s tour went through L.A.—that he was leery of a musical. “I didn’t want to be a part of anything that would destroy a thing that I think is so beautiful,” he says.

Growing up in Ashland, Kentucky, Kazee began playing guitar at the age of twelve and set his sights on acting as a teenager, landing his first big role as a replacement Sir Lancelot in Spamalot and, more recently, starring in 110 in the Shade. Last year, his passions collided in the part of a rock star in Working Class, Country Music Television’s first-ever sitcom (“I never got to play, though,” he says). Ultimately, he couldn’t resist the premise of Once. “It spoke to me on a music level and on a love level,” he says. “We’re certainly an unconventional love story, not wrapped up in a happy bow. But in a weird way we’re sort of a real relationship because in life you meet someone and fall in love and most of the time, things don’t work out.”

His costar Cristin Milioti—Broadway audiences may know her from Coram Boy, but she was a riot as a faux-ditzy comedy writer in a guest spot on 30 Rock—had no qualms about adapting the film, on the other hand, since she had not (and still has not) seen it. And though her tryout was nearly derailed by the need to learn a lot of Mendelssohn very quickly (it’s practically New York theater lore that she learned classical piano in ten days to get the part), she did come into it with one spectacular ancestral credential. “My mother’s father’s father is Czechoslovakian and oddly enough married an Irishwoman and came over here,” she says.

As a teenager in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Milioti had always wanted to be a rock star. “Life works in mysterious ways,” she says. “My entire life I dreamed of being a musician, and I never went down that path. And I did acting because I thought, Oh, that’s less of a risk. And that was always going to be a part of my life that I denied. And then this came up, and I don’t know how I am so lucky.”

Lucky to be in the cast and the band, she means, both of which in this production at times rub shoulders directly with the audience. John Tiffany’s genius stroke in turning Once into a theatrical experience was to invite the audience onto the stage before the show begins to have drinks and mingle with the musicians. “The film is so absolutely humble and lo-fi and is obviously about the healing power of music,” he says. “It reminded me of growing up in a tiny village in Yorkshire. It reminded me of my childhood. There’s this whole phenomenon, especially among middle-class men, where they won’t talk about things that are emotional, but they will sing about them.” And that is when it hit Tiffany. “I got the idea that the story of Once could be like a song sung in a pub—the currency of the show is musical instruments. It would be a bar that people could enter into. Someone said to me, ‘You won’t get Americans to come up onstage.’ And I said, ‘They will if I put alcohol on the stage.’ ”

And they do. The set, designed by Bob Crowley, who also did the costumes, couldn’t be simpler: a rustic pub with a bar, some tables and chairs, and a brick wall that, in a beautiful moment, becomes a starry sky. With fiddles, mandolins, and a spinet piano on hand, songs break out before you know it, even as the audience relaxes with a drink onstage, creating an immediate dramatic intimacy. There’s also the kind of improvisation that happens only with live musical performances. For instance, one night, before the play officially began, an actor broke into “On Raglan Road,” a Patrick Kavanagh poem set to a tune called “Fáinne Geal an Lae” that’s several centuries old yet still able to immediately lock the audience in a trance.

Enda Walsh wrote the book for the musical, drawing inspiration from Hansard and Irglová’s songs, including such pure crowd-pleasers from the film as “If You Want Me” and “When Your Mind’s Made Up.” Choosing Walsh to author the book was a little like using a flamethrower to light the birthday-cake candles. His plays at St. Ann’s Warehouse—The Walworth Farce, Penelope, The New Electric Ballroom, and Misterman—were comic and brilliant as well as deeply dark, not the kind of thing that pleases a Wicked crowd. “I thought I was a very weird person to ask, to be honest,” he recalls. “I was thinking, Do you know my work?” He wound up taking it on as an adventure and a little working vacation in joy. “By the end of the morning of the first day, I thought, I can really do this—it would be good for my soul. It would be really good for me to do something unabashedly romantic!”

Walsh’s artfulness is in laying down the already loved songs in a play that in many ways is the antithesis of the film. In lieu of emotional camerawork, Walsh intersperses the dialogue and lyrics with deliberate moments of quiet, what Tiffany might call pub silences. And then the joyful songs fill in the meaningful blanks, playing the characters like instruments.“At first I thought, They’re not saying anything,” says Milioti, “and then I thought, Duh! That’s like life. Enda writes silences.